We spent one day traveling eastward through the Amazon River back out to the Atlantic Ocean. As I do my daily walk on deck, I see people getting a little nostalgic about the huge bugs that have been floating along with us on this portion of the trip. When we reached the Atlantic, I expected the brown, silty water to change to deep blue seas again, but they did not. I forgot that the Amazon continues out into the Atlantic for fully 200 miles! I also figured that our hot, humid weather was over, but again I was mistaken. I was reminded that we are still in the tropics.

We have crossed the equator multiple times this Voyage, especially traveling on the Amazon. For our last crossing of the equator, the ship’s crew staged a King Neptune ceremony. From what I hear, this is an extremely mild version of what used to happen and/or what happened on military ships. OUR version was held on the Lido deck around the pool. The assistant cruise director was King Neptune (with a Scottish accent) and the Queen (the Captain’s wife) held court as the crew members who were crossing the equator for the first time were brought before them. Ultimately, each crew member had to kiss a codfish (displayed on a nice ice sculpture) and were coated with some sort of slime that looked like pastel-colored cake frosting. The chief officers were in attendance and the tall, thin captain can be seen in my picture.

True to the Amazon’s weather pattern, the sunny skies 20 minutes before the ceremony changed to torrential rain and a driving wind just five minutes later. I had found a terrific viewing spot on the deck above the pool, so I held my ground and got soaked. Luckily, the couple next to me had their umbrella and let me huddle down-wind which protected me somewhat from the worst of the rain. The storm disappeared as quickly as it started and the weather was beautiful by the time the ceremony began!

In the meantime, Ron was in the cabin watching the monitor so he could record our last equator crossing. If you look at the latitude value in the upper left of the screen you can see it change from South to North. Unfortunately, the latitude never showed up as 0.0.

As usual, there were terrific lectures, wonderful entertainment, and art classes. I tried to capture views of the Opera House in Manaus and the interesting bridge that leads from the pier into the town at Alter do Chão.